Centrist politics, philosophy, social commentary

Menu

Proof that Obama is not a racist, but a true egalitarian!

Recently, Obama noted Rand Paul’s prudent move to distant himself from Cliven Bundy’s controversial remarks on “the negro”*. At a White House Correspondence Dinner, Obama stated “As a general rule, things don’t end well if the sentence starts with, ‘Let me tell you something about the Negro’…You don’t really need to know the rest of it, just a tip for you.” Many who know the whole story, know that Cliven Bundy was actually lamenting the breakdown of the black family structure, and that he also applauded Mexicans (whom he calls “Spanish” because he’s old and doesn’t know any better) for their tight nit families and strong work ethic. If you know this, than you might think Obama is being unfair.

I’m actually going to give Obama some credit here. Unlike the double-standard race-baters at MSNBC, Obama is very consistent in taking racially insensitive comments out of context and advocating for such commenters to be ostracized, with little concern for context or circumstances. For those who think that Obama is anti-white, let me give you a little flashback.

In 2010, Andrew Brietbart found a speech by a USDA director Shirley Sherrod. She’s a black woman who was giving a speech at an NAACP event, and made some comments that, if taken out of context, make her appear anti-white. She discussed how she initially joined the USDA to help those in need, mainly thinking of poor black farmers. Yet the first person she was to help was a white man. Due to growing up in the rural south, Sherrod admitted at first that she perceived him to have a “superior attitude” towards her. She also admitted that she “didn’t give him the full force of what I could do.” If you stop right there, it looks like Sherrod was being negligent in her duties because he was a white man from the south. That’s exactly where the Brietbart clip stopped. This clip led Obama to fire Sherrod. However, Shirley Sherrod later became good friends with this man and learned a valuable lesson. We’re all in the same boat, regardless of skin color. That was the point she was trying to make at this NAACP event, but to Obama, context is irrelevant when it comes to the possibility of racism.

Now, Obama is simply treating Bundy the same way he treated Sherrod. Rather than looking into the speech in detail and trying to understand his point, he took a few careless words from an old farmer out of context and decided that he, too, should be ostracized. Obama consistently applies the same standards to all, regardless of skin color, regardless of religion or sexual orientation. Obama truly is a man who supports equal opportunity for everyone, and for that, I applaud him. Thanks Obama!

*For the record, Rand Paul still supports Bundy’s rights, he has simply denounced those particular comments.